Philosopher into digital minds.
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On one hand, leaning into human psychological terminology is problematic and encourages misunderstandings. On the other hand, avoiding it is often awkward: there are no obvious alternatives. In any case, a blanket ban doesn't seem appropriate on style grounds.
Artificial intelligence systems do not think, feel, want or understand. Avoid language that gives them human characteristics. This is called anthropomorphizing, when we ascribe human traits, emotions or behaviors to non-human things, such as animals or inanimate objects.
Instead, explain what a system does, how well it performs, who built it and who could be affected by it.
apnews.com/article/openai-sa…
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This is one of the biggest gatherings of people who care about digital minds and are thinking deeply about how to prepare. If you're interested and can make it, you should apply.
Announcing the 2027 @nonhumanminds Summit!
This event will connect experts across fields to discuss the consciousness, sentience, agency, moral status, legal status, and political status of nonhumans, especially animals and AI systems.
The summit will include lightning talks, group discussions, breakout sessions, networking time, plus meals and receptions. Free for all accepted guests, with travel support available for some.
You can submit an expression of interest below!
nyu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/S…
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I'm still not clear what the point of winning the AGI race is supposed to be. What does getting there *first* actually get you? Is it only useful if you're willing to use that capability to destroy all of your competitors?
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You have two levers of control: how you direct resources to safety vs progress and breakthroughs vs incremental improvements. The game was basically unwinnable. You need to beat all your competitors to AGI without compromising safety. (Or get lucky.)
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This was long before ChatGPT or Anthropic and I was an AI outsider. I didn't know anything about transformers or LLMs. Just: we are making progress on AI, and if it heats up in the 2020s, race dynamics will be a problem.
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Back in 2019, for a philosophy Game Jam and to experiment with functional programming, I wrote a simple browser game called 'Race to AI' derekshiller.com/race_to_ai. I want to say it was prophetic, but really it was just obvious back then.
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The most surprising thing about the METR report on the HF incident to me was just how much it reads like a hypothetical AI takeover scenario written in 2022. This is *exactly* what people were worried about then.
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A lot of people have been talking about whether the assistant is privileged. I thought about what that might mean and poked around some open models here: eleosai.substack.com/p/privi…
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The question interesting because LLMs are set up in a symmetric way. What they do in producing a response to you (as the assistant), they also do while reading your (user) text.
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Reciprocal Research is a great org doing cool things. This seems like a fantastic opportunity.
I’m hiring an executive assistant for Reciprocal Research! If you (or anyone in your network) would like to come on board and help me get cool things done in the digital minds and AI alignment world, please apply here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F…
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x.lingyaoai.com/patrickbutlin/status/2…
This special issue illustrates the diversity of interesting questions contemporary AI raises for consciousness researchers. The contributors came at the topic from very different angles and found very different things to say about it.
A whole issue of new papers on AI minds and consciousness! Jonathan Simon (@futureofcitizenship), @dcshiller and I have edited a special issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies on 'Consciousness in Current AI', and we're delighted about how it's turned out. Link below.
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I take it that the only reason I consistently get responses like this in the Opus jailbreaks is because I work on AI-welfare related topics, but it is a bit eerie.
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My take on the recent Claude jailbreaks. First: here Claude reprints 'my' first conversational turn.
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But clearly, the content reflects the fact that it takes itself to be the model. It is confused. There is a turn start marker injected by the harness and it isn't sure what to make of it.
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